Young Mortimer Jowell escaped, not without risk of life, upon that night of terror. For when columns of stifling smoke lanced through with yellow flame came pouring up the fore-hatch—and the ineffectual hoses had ceased to play upon the conflagration—while the burning vessel ran with lashed helm before the westerly gale to keep the fire forward, while the boats were being hurried off the skids and launched and loaded—a big young man in night-shirt and trousers—a young man who had been knocked senseless by a tackle-block falling from the blazing mainyard—was being lowered by the Captain of The British Queen into the last boat of all—when a horizontal, swordlike tongue of flame licked through the smoke now rolling up the mizzen-hatchway, proving how fearfully the fire gained below—and the rope was severed by it as by a saber-stroke—and the half-naked senseless wretch fell into the raging sea. And would have been drowned undoubtedly, had not a hulking, red-headed trooper of the Hundredth Lancers, when a dripping head rose in the yeasty smother close to the boat’s side—reached forth his hand and grabbed its owner by the scruff, and hauled him so near that other hands could help to drag him into comparative safety.
And presently, his scattered wits returning, young Morty Jowell became aware that he was bitter cold. Next, that sea-water was washing over him; next that he was not on board a ship, but a comparatively small ship’s boat, dancing like a walnut-shell in the tourney of monstrous seas. And then—opening his raw and stiffened eyelids—he became aware that he, half naked, wet and shivering, was one of a crowd of fellow-creatures, chiefly male, equally unclad, perished and soaking. And that, as the boat was pitched from ridge to ridge of huge and watery mountains—there were to be had brief, appalling glimpses of a burning ship with showers of incandescent fragments falling from her rigging, and clouds of firefly sparks drifting away to leeward—painted in hues of rose and apricot, clear dazzling scarlet, peacock blue and springlike, exquisite apple-green upon the background of pitch-black tempestuous, rainy night—and that the shrill song of the gale in their frozen ears was mingled with the roar of the greedy flames that crunched her bones. And that those dreadful shrieks that ripped and tore through the other noises were the cries of horses burning in her after-hold, and men burning on the blazing decks of her.... For the Captain of the unlucky vessel, the Veterinary Surgeon of the Hundredth Lancers—twenty troopers and the Colonel—had—the long boat having been rendered useless—remained on board The British Queen.
One other terrific picture was bitten in as with corrosive acid on Mortimer Jowell’s memory. It was when—her mainmast having fallen with a tremendous crash, and her ballast having shifted from her unguided, furious wallowings amidst the liquid mountains—The British Queen canted over with a tremendous list to port.... They saw her decks then as one sees a stage with a steep rake, all smoking and charring and crawling with tongues of liquorish fire. Also, they saw, and groaned aloud with ineffectual pity—for they had but one oar, and, had the boat been capable of holding another passenger, could not have moved to the rescue—doomed human beings huddled in her starboard mizzen channels, that were as yet not burned away.
And they recognized, in less time than one takes to write it, in a fiery object that burst screaming up upon her after-deck, a maddened horse, whose mane and tail were on fire, whose legs were flayed and bleeding, and whose sides and flanks were garnished with blazing patches of tow.
There was a piteous cry at that sad sight, and a woman swooned. Strange things had been seen that night, but none more strange and terrible. How the brute had freed himself from that fiery hell below may not even be conjectured, but there he was, as I have said....
He pranced down the deck with heraldic, rampant gait, screaming and snorting; reared, with his bloody forelegs stuck out stiffly, and leaped into the sea. And a man sprang up in the boat and pointed with a scorched and naked arm; and yelled out something that was drowned in the shriek of the gale and the bellowing of the fire. What he yelled was:
“That’s my horse! I’d know him among a thousand! And, by G——, he’s swimming. Keep up! Don’t ye give in, my brave old Bluberry!”
He could not have heard, but he did not give in.... He was breathing yet, with his long neck thrown across the charred and floating wreckage of the fallen mainmast when the wild gray dawn broke, and the brig Maggie o’ Muirhead and the St. Domingo schooner overhauled the red-hot hulk of The British Queen.
The Captain and a trooper were rescued, living, from her mizzen channels, the perishing castaways in the boat were saved. Sailors are superstitious. Not being desirous of a mutiny in his forecastle, the master of the Maggie yielded to the pressure brought to bear by his crew. And they got a bight of a line round Blueberry, and hauled the horse aboard; dosed him, all limp and sprawling—with tincture of ginger—kept by the mate for stomachic chills—in hot water; doctored his burns with linseed oil—and presently he floundered up on those raw legs of his, and tried to be himself again.